CAT Lab Big Tent Meetings

At CAT Lab, we host regular meetings for the broader community of students, staff, and faculty collaborators we work with. These meetings are drop-in events to share your ideas, keep learning, and collectively discuss with peers. This is a no-commitment space—we want to hear ideas and talk them through, at any stage of a question, idea or project.

The objective of the big tent CAT community meeting is to speak with the broader spectrum of people aligned with or overlapping with CAT Lab. It’s a place to float an idea, share a question or something we’ve noticed, and work with colleagues to reflect on questions and issues that are coming up in our work on equity, technology, data, research, and digital life. The meeting’s flow is very light: each meeting starts with an idea (with or without pre-reading) and we all reflect on it! Programming is mutually decided by participants.  

Meeting mechanics: Everyone who’s actively involved in some way in a CAT Lab project is invited, and facilitation rotates. Participation in the meeting is often associated with access to a #catlab channel in our internal chat network. The host can either self-facilitate, or ask a colleague.

We typically meet once every two weeks, but may meet more often if there is demand. We also follow Cornell’s academic schedule and break for breaks. Meetings last an hour. For the Spring 2024 semester, our meeting slot is on Friday from 2:30-3:30 ET.

Spring 2024 Schedule

Past Big Tent Topics

2023

• Navigating your conference campaign
• Practical Challenges of Participatory Research. A Discussion on Reciprocity, Collaboration, and Extraction
• What Expertise Do Communities Actually Bring to Science & Tech? Tara Yosso on Community Cultural Wealth

2022

• Creating Change in Academia – An Introduction